Make locating missing volume files when opening session easier

[christophe.leterrier@…]

The following bug report has been submitted:
Platform:        Darwin-19.0.0-x86_64-i386-64bit
ChimeraX Version: 0.91 (2019-12-03)
Description
If multiple image files are missing when ChimeraX opens a session and I am asked to locate the missing file, start in the same directory I chose for replacing the previous file.  Requested by Christophe Leterrier.

Log:
UCSF ChimeraX version: 0.91 (2019-12-03)  
© 2016-2019 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.  
How to cite UCSF ChimeraX  




OpenGL version: 4.1 ATI-3.2.24
OpenGL renderer: AMD Radeon Pro 580 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

[Tom Goddard]

From: Christophe Leterrier
Subject: [chimerax-users] Relative paths to source files in saved sessions
Date: December 4, 2019 at 12:35:23 PM PST
To: chimerax-users@…

Hi,

I'm working on multiple Chimera sessions on different computers, syncing the content of the folders and cxs files. However when opening a cxs file on a different computer, I have to manually relocate all the source files every time (in my case tif stacks, and even navigate for each of them from the cxs folder to the source files folder because the folder is reset at every source file selection).

Would it be possible to somehow store the relative path between the cxs file and the source files in the cxs file, or try relative if absolute paths fail? I have no idea how this is done currently, so sorry if this is an unrealistic/undesirable proposal.

Thank you,

Christophe

[Tom Goddard]

Fixed.

When you locate a missing image files when opening a session ChimeraX tried to use the same directory substitution (original directory to new directory) for locating other missing image files. But this directory translation only worked on the directory immediately containing the image file. So if you used image stacks or dicom data where the image files are in multiple subdirectories, like data1/*.tif and data2/*.tif then the automatic replacement didn't help. The fixed code now translates higher levels of the path when trying to find missing files. So if you replace /a/b/data1/*.tif with /c/d/data1/*.tif then it will automatically try /a/b/data2/*.tif -> /c/d/data2/*.tif. I think this will handle your case so that if the missing data files are all in the same relative place but under a different higher level directory then you will only have to locate one file.